Joe de Bruyn, a man whose name is synonymous with homophobia, and with bowing and scraping before the bosses, has announced he is standing down from the leadership of the retail and fast food workers’ union.

De Bruyn has been national secretary-treasurer of the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees’ Association (SDA) for 36 years. He is to step aside in October. The current New South Wales state secretary, Gerard Dwyer, is slated to take his place.

The news of de Bruyn’s exit should be greeted with relief by every unionist, in fact every worker, in Australia. During his leadership, the SDA has capitulated to the major retail firms on every front: entrenching casualisation, sub-par wages and a culture of industrial passivity.

The SDA has become notorious for its bureaucratic model of unionism, in which members are delivered to it through deals with big bosses like Coles, Woolworths and McDonalds. In exchange for these companies’ signing workers up to the union, the SDA plays limp on industrial issues and gives the bosses a nearly free hand in the workplace.  

For fast food workers the utter treachery of this strategy was epitomised in April 2010, when a national agreement signed by the union and McDonalds was ruled by the Fair Work Commission (then known as Fair Work Australia) to fall short of the minimum legal standards for employment in Australia.

The pattern is the same for retail workers. While across all industries inflation-adjusted wages have risen for workers by an average of 4 percent since 1998 – and in some more heavily unionised areas like education and construction, by as much as 14 percent – in retail, wages have fallen by 7 percent over the period.

The problem hasn’t been that de Bruyn is shy of a fight – he relishes a stoush. The factional power of the SDA, as the largest trade union in Australia, has given it immense influence in the Labor Party and peak union bodies. For years, de Bruyn has wielded the union’s power as a political sledgehammer in an unpopular crusade against marriage equality, abortion rights and access to IVF for lesbians and single women.

In a 2012 submission to a Senate inquiry on marriage equality, de Bruyn argued on behalf of the SDA: “The whole construction of the regeneration of society has as its foundational level the family based on marriage between a man and woman … as anecdotal evidence shows, apart from elitists and activists, this is a non-issue for the public at large.”

De Bruyn is a poisonous element within the labour movement. His advocacy of a reactionary social agenda divides workers and can only weaken our ability to fight the bosses.

With all of this in mind, it’s perhaps not a surprise that it was that fine mouthpiece of the bosses in this country, the Australian, which was first to hear about the change in leadership of the SDA. Despite being reported in its pages on 4 March, the news has still not been communicated to the 200,000 union members whom de Bruyn is supposed to represent.  

Those members unlucky enough to have picked up that disgraceful right-wing rag can rest assured that the decision for de Bruyn to step down and for Dwyer to succeed him has “been canvassed and agreed within the union’s executive”.

Those of us who are fighting for a truly democratic and fighting union for retail and fast food workers should be clear that de Bruyn’s resignation will not in itself pave the way for progressive change; it has been orchestrated entirely on the terms of the leadership.

There is nothing to suggest that there will be any shift from de Bruyn’s bankrupt social conservatism and yellow unionism. Rank and file groups like SDA Members for Marriage Equality need to build our numbers and our ability to present an alternative to the de Bruyns in SDA leadership before there will be any hope of that.

Nonetheless, those of us dedicated to the fight for a union we can be proud of should toast the end of the tyranny of that wretched man. And let us organise and fight to make sure his toxic legacy in our union won’t last much longer.